I like the commentary at the top. Approximately: “In this poem Rudyard Kipling is clearly just a bitter old man desperately clinging to the old ways; we are more enlightened than him though”. Meanwhile, the Gods of the copybook headings are closing in. Delicious Irony, or as they say on 4chan, Top Kek.

A Conflict of Visions, Lakoff’s (prog alert) Moral Politics are both trying to tackle the same phenomenon. Jonathan Haidt adds in a semi-quantifiable moral framework and exposes how the right has a balanced moral system, while the left suffers from a form of moral autism. The progs simply cannot reason or moralize outside their limited moral framework.

Useful for analysis. Useful for demoralization and propaganda as well.

I’ve read, and reviewed, Lakoff’s Moral Politics. I think that the first two-thirds, where he’s being analytical, are brilliant. His analsysis of the difference between ordinary conservatives and ordinarily liberals as being driven by their conception of the proper model for a family relationship, is spot-on, and handles many of the seemingly weird ways in which the two sides don’t seem to make logical sense. The model is extensible to Europe, if one realizes that the patriarchal family model is *different* in Europe, which explains much of the difference between European and American conservatism. The last third, where he gets seriously polemical, is rather easy to take apart – a model for guiding interactions between tens of people isn’t necessarily useful for guiding interactions between tens of millions of people, and while most ordinary liberals believe in the “nurturant parent” model, real existing liberal policies more closely approximate the “neglectful permissive” model (more so than conservative policies approximate the “authoritarian-abusive” model).